Review of Brown's "Tacky's Revolt" (2020)
Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), pgs. 320.
Vincent Brown takes what often is considered a minor event in the Atlantic World, Tacky’s Revolt, and aids scholars of slavery, the Atlantic World, and the Caribbean to see that this revolt is a key point in a much larger story. Even for non-academic readers, this book will provide a fascinating story that opens the 18th Jamaican world to deeper exploration. He creatively engages so many different historiographies it is quite staggering. This review will not engage with all of them, but instead highlight some things that I find most compelling.
Brown begins his narrative with the connections of Apongo Wager with Englishmen in Africa and Jamaica. Apongo was an African leader and rebellion leader in the 1760s. Brown complicates traditional narratives of slavery, race, and slave rebellions by shifting from the local to the broader Atlantic. Framing Apongo’s life within the context of what he calls an “Atlantic Slave War,” a term drawing on Enlightenment thought that slaveholding is an act of war against the enslaved, Brown argues that you cannot understand Tacky’s Revolt without understanding the underlying history. Building off existing scholarship that shows the brutality of the Atlantic World, Brown argues that this merely part of a larger “archipelago of insurrection” in a world of violence and warfare. The Atlantic world was one of rising and collapsing empires. Building off what he calls a radical tradition of Caribbean scholarship (which in reality is the Marxist tradition), he suggests that capitalism with its entourage of violence and exploitation, is what binds the Atlantic world together. With this in mind, Tacky’s Revolt is not a regional and minor event, but in fact a crucial part of the larger Seven Years War, one that would have lasting consequences for the development of slavery and slave codes in the British Empire.
Brown putting Tacky’s Revolt in an Atlantic context is a point that deserves further reflection. Slave revolts in Jamaica were not isolated but were connected to Europe and Africa. While some scholars have emphasized the role of European ideology among slave revolts, such as the Haitian Revolution, Brown sees no such draw. The prominence of Africa is an important interjection that has begun to grow in recent years. Moving away from abolitionist narratives of an “Edenic” Africa, a place of unsophisticated and innocence, Africa is a complex and dynamic region that deserves as much attention as other parts of the Atlantic Basin. He demonstrates that African peoples were agents, actors in generating history, on all sides of the Atlantic world and that despite enslaver’s best efforts to decouple African peoples from their past, they remained a force in creating a Atlantic world.
Brown’s book is brilliant, however I would have liked to have seen even even greater agency given to the people’s of Africa. Empire building is never a hegemonic domination of lesser peoples but rather is a complex interaction with other powers (both European and non-European) and cooperation with local groups. Brown is a far more careful scholar than many who seek to frame slave rebellions as radical proletariat Blacks versus capitalist whites. What is missing in these narratives, and to which Brown alludes, is that there was no hegemonic “Black” experience or belief system. It was a kaleidoscope of cultures that were smashed together in the Atlantic world. Brown is good at showing the complexities of this, yet he succumbs to one of the tendencies of the aforementioned group in making European domination almost inevitable (because of the evil of racial capitalism) and the slave rebellion’s failure, certain. I fundamentally disagree with this view as it takes agency from the actors in the Africa. At no point during this period was European dominance a given and was contested by powerful forces in Africa. Furthermore, rebellions have been able to survive despite overwhelming odds. Agency is a double edged sword in that decisions can lead to remarkable success or remarkable failure. Allowing this to happen opens up a more complex and more accurate narrative.
There are many things that can be said about this book and Brown’s ability as a scholar. His work is fantastic and provides new and powerful ways to engage with the Atlantic world and Black agency. His engagement with the politics of fear and the challenges of empire building from a ground level will be essential for scholars of Jamaica and the Atlantic world. I highly recommend this engaging and insightful scholarship.
Robert Swanson